Spring flips to summer, more sun, more son, more daughter, more space, less fast pace, more time TO READ! Two-thirds of the poetry I read in a year is done in the summer. During the school year, alas, I wrestle with the poets I already know; summer gives me the mental state in which I can butt heads with "new" writers. One of this summer's delights is Luljeta Lleshanaku, her Fresco, a selection of poetry edited and co-translated by Henry Israeli.
Luljeta Lleshanaku's vibrates, keeps you alert, line to line, stanza to stanza, shaking Breton, Aragon, Eluard out of their trees, out of their boots, turning me inside out. On the surface, plain, but roiling, roiling underneath, perhaps like Albania:
What Is Known
The search for unknown words
is a complete failure.
They have all been discovered.
They are round and soft, without mystery
little planets festering with ants too tired
to mount a hobo's shoe.
Rosary in hand
the words count crimson drops
of silence dripping from above
and repeat themselves over and over
like demented men.
But they take pride in their age.
After all, they are exhibits in a museum
and I, transitory, passing before them
can only cloud their glass
with my breath.
Peter Constantine's introduction was superb (as was Israeili's, a bio of sorts of Lleshanaku), summarizing Albania's post WWII history, with especial focus on how the Stalin-era silenced anything but state-approved literature. Constantine points out that when the dictatorship ended in 1990 "for the first time there was complete freedon of expression." Some poets expressed their pent-up hatred for the recent past, writing poetry "loudly voicing the terror that had been and the terror that was perhaps to come." Lleshanaku went another direction, eschewing political and social themes--you have to look deeply under the lines in her poems to catch a tinge of the terror that was Enver Hoxa's Albania. That's what makes her work standout, makes it readable to someone in Moscow, Idaho, 2007, with little knowledge of the Balkans.
